Amerie Mi Marie Rogers walks over to the window of her hotel suite and soaks up the panorama of London. "Every time I'm here, I'm always working," she sighs, "so I never really get to explore ... I wanna see the Crown Jewels! Last year, I got my picture taken with one of the Queen's guards. My sister and I put our arms around him, holding hands, and he didn't even flinch! He seemed real tall - do they only hire very tall men?"

Today is a restful day for the rising R&B star, who became an international hit two years ago with the single 1 Thing. Restful means only a couple of press interviews; no television cameras and no photo shoots, so she can dress down in a plain, smart charcoal dress, no make-up, hair tied back in a pony tail. She's been toiling diligently for years, a work-ethic explained in part by the title of her new album, Because I Love It.

As for the constant travelling of her life, well, that's all she's ever known. On her MySpace page, Amerie describes herself as a "military brat". "My dad worked for the army," she says. "I was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts in 1980. A year later, we moved to Germany, then Korea, then Alaska, then Texas, then Virginia, then New York, then back to Texas. To me, moving around was regular; I couldn't imagine staying in one place forever. Like, wouldn't you get bored?" Her peripatetic existence made her more confident, more extrovert, she says. "It also made me appreciate my alone time. And it made me very close to my family - we were the only constants in each other's lives."

Her mother is Korean. "My Korean background is important to me, it's part of who I am. Korean was my first language, but I've forgotten much of it - when we moved back to America, mum spoke English at home, so I wouldn't struggle at school. It was always 'Study, study, study'. We could only go out at the weekends, couldn't use the phone during the week. I didn't mind. I preferred to stay inside anyway, playing with my sister, or talking to my parents, or reading. My sister, though, was livid; she'd scream 'I'll never do this to my kids!' And she sticks by that." Her sister Angela, still only 25, is now a successful lawyer, and Amerie is one of her clients.

While in high school, she'd already begun writing and recording at home in her room, multitracking her vocals using two Dictaphones until she'd built up a song. Shortly before she enrolled at Georgetown University to study English Literature and Fine Arts, she announced to her parents that she was going to pursue a career in music. "I don't think they were too worried, because I was still going to college," she adds. "Though my mother really wanted me to be an author. She still says I'll be a writer in my future."

Her memories of Georgetown are, she says, a "blur", though not for the reasons that might typically cloud a graduate's recall. "Even when I was in high school, and my friends smoked marijuana, it was never something that I wanted to do. I don't have any moral objection, or anything. I just figure a woman needs her wits about her. I studied seven hours a day, totally overdid it," she laughs. Her weekends were spent writing songs and visiting nightclubs, singing for any vaguely industry people she met.

It was while in DC that she discovered go-go, the ultra-percussive mutation of funk and soul (and, later, hip-hop) that has defined the city's music since it surfaced in the late 1970s, but which, save the odd crossover single, has never really broken through to the outside world. "I credit go-go music with loosening me up," she says. "Just because you're black doesn't mean you can dance - it's more about being around other people who can dance. I grew up in Germany, I didn't hear much soul music. When I got back to Texas, all my friends would laugh at me when I tried to dance. I was really self-conscious, stiff, and that stiffness carried on for years. And then I heard go-go," she grins. "The bells, the cymbals, the drums ... It just loosened me up, I lost all my self-consciousness."

The manager of a local nightclub put her in touch with his buddy Rich Harrison, an up and coming producer who'd recently worked with Mary J Blige. "We met at a McDonald's parking lot," she remembers. "I didn't want to meet at his place or mine, because I didn't know him yet. And music always sounds better on a car stereo."

Amerie sang Harrison a couple of her songs, and he played her some beats he was working on. "They were R&B but they weren't straight-laced, they had a hip-hop feel to them. I loved them." They began working on tracks that would win Amerie a contract with Columbia records, recording in the basement of Harrison's parents' home, Amerie singing her vocals from a beaten-up sofa, the Harrisons' washing machine poking into her back.

Her debut, All I Have, surfaced in 2002; more muted and pop-orientated than what would follow, it was nevertheless enough of a success to guarantee Amerie a second album. "On that first album, I was really into writing chilled songs," she says, "but really, I loved up-tempo songs. I wanted to make sure that next time around I had some aggressive stuff, and lots of drums!"

In between All I Have and its sequel, 2005's Touch, Harrison had produced Beyoncé's blockbuster hit Crazy In Love. His next big production, Amerie's 1 Thing, would best that track at its own game, sharpening its dynamic R&B with the percussive attack of go-go. Lifting four bars from Oh, Calcutta!, an obscure cut by New Orleans funk band the Meters, and bolstering the loop with an avalanche of syncopated drums and cymbals, Harrison's beat was instant dancefloor dynamite; Amerie's multitracked vocals knocked the track out of the ballpark, sighing with abandon and singing a nagging hook that was tighter than a whipcrack.

The success of 1 Thing helped Touch to shift more than 120,000 copies in its first week of release, and marked Amerie's graduation to a celebrity she enjoys on her own terms. "I've been to the MTV awards, the Grammies, fundraisers for Giorgio Armani's Red campaign for Aids relief in Africa. I enjoy myself; it's only every now and again, and I know that immediately afterwards I'm gonna go home, change into relaxing clothes, bake some apple turnovers and watch a DVD. People ask me, is the music industry really crazy? It's what you make of it. You can be out all the time, falling out of clubs half-drunk if you want to. But if you want it to be regular and normal, it can be that too."

Harrison wasn't involved in Because I Love It, an amicable and not permanent split arising from Amerie's desire to experiment with other producers (a planned Harrison collaboration was scuppered by their incompatible schedules). She fondly remembers the sessions as days spent alone in a darkened studio with her trusted engineer Cornell "Nell" Brown, painstakingly carving songs from the hundreds of vocal tracks she'd recorded. The album doesn't put a foot wrong, from the icy 1980s soul of Crush, to fiendishly danceable Cee-Lo Green collaboration Take Control, to Gotta Work, a beat by hot new DC producers One Up that's even more combustibly funky than 1 Thing. "I call the sound 'go-go Soul'," she says. "Go-go's like really strong black coffee, some people can't ingest it in its purest form."

But isn't all that activity hard work? "It's more fun than ever," she protests. "Music's not the only thing in my life, I'm into family and friends, and exploring new things, reading books that have nothing to do with this, spiritual books, books on the world." Her nightstand currently heaves under the weight of Thomas Friedman's globalisation tome The World Is Flat, Deepak Chopra's The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, and a biography of Elizabeth Taylor.

"I'm not in this for money and fame," she adds, finally, "but for that feeling I get when I'm creating, making something tangible. It's the most amazing feeling ever. Unless the world is annihilated or whatever, that moment in time is immortalised. It's like the album title says, I do it, because I love it."